price

price — cost is the floor, value is the ceiling

Your internal cost is the floor — below it, you lose money. Value to the client is the ceiling — above it, the math stops working for them. The right price sits closer to the ceiling than the floor. Most undercharging happens because people anchor on cost-plus and forget the ceiling exists.

How to estimate value

Ask, in this order:

• Time saved — hours per week, multiplied by loaded cost, multiplied by how long the saving compounds.
• Revenue unlocked — new deals, faster cycles, expansion paths the work makes possible.
• Risk removed — outages avoided, regulatory penalties dodged, key-person dependency reduced.
• Cost avoided — the wrong-path alternative (hiring, rebuilding later, internal rework).

When you can quantify, quantify. When you can't, bracket — low / likely / high. A bracketed estimate is honest and still useful as an anchor. "If this saves your ops team even 5 hours a week, that's [low] $50k / [likely] $120k / [high] $200k a year" beats refusing to estimate because it isn't precise.

The discomfort signal

The right price has the right kind of discomfort.

• No discomfort — under-priced. The client said yes too easily. You'll resent it by week three.
• Productive discomfort — they pause, ask a few questions, want to think. This is correct. Real decisions involve real friction.
• Too much discomfort — wrong client, wrong problem, or wrong positioning. Don't drop the price; revisit the fit (position).

Never normalize to hourly

If a client asks "what's your hourly rate?", the answer is that you don't bill that way for this kind of work — and a short reason why. Hourly billing is the wrong unit for value work: it caps your upside, rewards inefficiency, and turns the relationship into time-watching. Even internally, only use hourly math to check your floor, not to set your price.

Pushback handling

When a client pushes back on price, the first move is to stay quiet and listen. Most pushback is exploratory, not a rejection. The wrong move is to instantly drop the number — that signals you didn't believe it.

If they have a real ceiling, move on scope, not on price. "I hear you on the budget — at that number, here's the smaller shape we can do" preserves your rate, gives them agency, and protects the relationship.

Know your walk-away

Decide, before the conversation, the lowest price you'd accept and still feel right about the work. If "good outcome at fair price" can't be reached, decline. Under-pricing trains the relationship — and the market segment — to undervalue you. The lost revenue from declining one bad-fit deal is recovered on the next good-fit one; the lost credibility from a year of resentful, under-priced work isn't.

Anti-patterns

• Hourly billing for value work — wrong unit; trades your upside for predictability.
• Rounding down on the first push-back — signals the original number was theatre.
• Cost-plus margin pricing — you're a vendor at that point, not an advisor.
• No walk-away number — without it, you'll cave under pressure and not know it until later.
• Discounting without a scope change — same scope, lower price, sets the new baseline forever.

Pair with propose (each tier needs a price), scope (price moves on scope, not on number), position (the spine to hold the number), and engagement-shape (different shapes price differently).